For the second time this week, Southern California has seen a rare sea beast washed ashore, far from home waters.

This time, it's a Stejneger's beaked whale, also known as the saber-toothed whale. The animal typically lives in deep Alaskan waters rather than in
the warm surf of tourist-choked Venice Beach in Los Angeles, which is where it
stranded on Wednesday.

In an extraordinary way
even for scientists, the carcass of the nearly 15-foot and 2,000-pound
whale was intact -- except for a couple of fresh bite marks from sharks.
The whale, a female, apparently was barely alive when it came ashore --
a highly unusual sight because beached whales are often badly
decomposed or badly eaten by marine life, a local biologist said.

"It was really humbling
and sad to see such a majestic creature stranded this way," said Heather
Doyle, director of the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium. She rushed down the
beach on her bicycle to witness the rarely-seen animal after staff
naturalist Brittany Corona happened upon a crowd surrounding the whale
on the sand.

Such a sighting of the whale up close in California "is a once in a lifetime opportunity," she added.

Oarfish hide in the deep
ocean. The one found in the island's Toyon Bay was so big -- 18 feet
long -- that it required 15 people to hold it chest-high in a trophy
photo taken by the Catalina Island Marine Institute.

"They're so rare and
unusual looking," Jim Dines of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
said of the oarfish and the saber-toothed whale. "They are like sea
monsters, and people really pick up on that."

Are their deaths freak events prompted by global warming?

"I think it's just
really a coincidence," Dines said. "It's too early to tell. If we were
to see a whole bunch of these animal strandings, that would give more
evidence of something going on."

Added marine biologist
Jose Bacallao of the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium: "I'm not going to
speculate on any wackiness, but I will say you have years of temperature
changes and we have had warmer waters.... I'm not saying the water
temperature brought that whale or the oarfish here, but it's still a
pretty amazing sight to see."

Dine is also a
mammalogist who performed a necropsy on the whale shortly after it was
found Wednesday. His examination showed no signs of trauma such as being
hit by a ship and no signs of disease or parasites, Dine said.

The female whale also
didn't have any food in her stomach -- aside from ingested plastic or
nylon that wasn't enough to kill her, Dine said.

The carcass did show two
or three fresh wounds from cookie-cutter sharks, whose name comes from
how their bites leave a round wound that cuts through skin, blubber and
muscle, Dines said. But those bites weren't mortal wounds, he said. In
fact, the whale had several dozen scars from such bites, which are
common in the species, he added.

Dines is waiting on testing results of tissue samples to determine a cause of death.

Though the animal's
death is unfortunate, scientists such as Dines are excited about its
discovery because so little is known about the deep-water animal that
lives in the north Pacific. Its strandings typically occur in Alaska or
Japan. Its last stranding in southern California was 15 years ago, Dines
said.

"There is some speculation that they do migrate in the winter, but it's not certain how far (south) they go," Dines said.

It's the adult male
whale that grows sabertooth-like teeth, used for combat against other
males for dominance in breeding, Dines said. The females don't grow the
saberteeth. The species is also known as the Stejneger's beaked whale.
As a whole, the front of the species' face resembles a goose beak, Dines
said.

"It's creating a lot of
excitement in the media and the public, but the scientists are just as
excited about this because it's a rare opportunity to study the natural
history of these kinds of animals that are so rarely observed, even by
marine specialists," Dines said.

Though the plastic found
in the whale's stomach didn't cause its death, the material's presence
in marine life is a growing concern.

"Certainly, pollution of
plastics in the ocean is a huge concern and causes I don't know the
number of deaths of marine animals," Dines said.

The discovery of the two
animals also occured as Manhattan Beach paddle-boarder Mark Durand
captured on his helmet camera a video of an 8-foot great white shark
swimming underneath him and grazing his board this week.

The series of events has
heightened public interest in what lurks within Los Angeles' coastal
waters, scientists said in interviews Thursday.

What now becomes of the two magnificent sea monsters?

Dines took several
tissue samples of the whale, and its skeleton will be placed in the
museum's collection of 4,000 marine specimens, used for research and
exhibition, he said. The 15-foot-long whale is just a little bit short
of the 18 feet common for females in the species.

As for the oarfish, its
18-foot length was too big for one freezer, so scientists cut it up into
small pieces and froze them, said Jeff Chace, program director of
Catalina Island Marine Institute.

Researchers will later
boil off the flesh and reconstruct the skeleton, using photographs taken
during the dissection of the deep-sea serpent.